


The Bamboo Spinner

by Franzeska



Category: Tang Chao | Tang Dynasty RPF
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:42:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28146294
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Franzeska/pseuds/Franzeska
Summary: In a thousand years, we'll both be dead
Comments: 3
Kudos: 11
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	The Bamboo Spinner

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Quillori](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quillori/gifts).



The wind shrieked through the pass, rattling the leaves like sabers in scabbards. It was odd to see bamboo here, Li He thought. He had always associated its green with warmth and summer and the past when things were still possible. Yet here stood a copse of it, a type with strange, dark stems and thin, dark leaves with a line of red down the center of each like blood in a fullered sword. The wind died away, but the rustle went on. It sounded like voices now, crying.

Li He glanced about him. The others were a distance away, trying to get the fire to light. They were at the end of their week's patrol, cold and yearning for the small comforts of the barracks. They had seen nothing on this pointless week's exercise. He would have welcomed the enemy by now or anything else that brought an end to this interminable cold and boredom. Even the voices were welcome. So long as the others were distracted, what difference did it make? What difference did it make in any case? They could pull the color from his skin as well as his hair, and it would make him no stranger or less understood. Human agency had dashed all his hopes. Supernatural could hardly do worse. He stepped into the copse.

"Hello?"

The dark forms of the bamboo closed around him, swaying minutely in the still air. They reminded him of the burnt timbers of a destroyed villa or the fingers of a cremated skeleton lying within it. His own fingers itched for a brush, but he continued on.

"What is it this time?"

A little way into the bamboo he heard it: the shush-shush of a spindle. Li He walked further into the grove. His boots whispered across the fallen leaves and the bone-white traces of snow.

A man in peasant's clothing sat on a rock, spinning bamboo leaves into thread. The resulting cord wound around his spindle like a black snake with a red belly. After each twirl, he tugged on a branch of bamboo and fed more leaves into his work. When he reached for the branch again, it was just as full with leaves as before.

"Well?" Li He asked.

He was cold and tired of people pestering him. He could make a poem of the man, but he could equally make a poem of the fire the others were failing to bring to life or of the relative warmth of the barracks. If he'd been luckier, he could have made poems of that too.

The spinner looked up as though only just spotting him. Li He snorted at this. It was as affected as they always were when they wanted something.

"Poet," said the spinner, "we meet at last."

"At last, or again?"

The last time, the cord had been emerald green and equally like a snake. It had been summer. But the spinner looked at him blankly like all the others before, as though they didn't seek him out and his appearance was just as much a surprise to them as theirs to him. Perhaps it was.

"Other men pass by," said the spinner, "but they do not see. I want them to see. I want the world to see."

"I cannot help what other men see."

"Show them. Show them. Let them look through your eyes."

"What difference would it make?" Li He asked. "They would think themselves mad as well as me. Why do you want to be seen?"

"Why does anyone? Immortality."

Li He snorted. He didn't think much of immortality. Even if he wrote a poem for the spinner, who would read it? A bookworm would eat up his work as quickly as earthworms ate his flesh. He coughed. The cold was eating at him already.

"In a hundred years," he said, "this will all be gone."

Usually, they argued the point and he wrote the poem to make them stop. This specter paused in his spinning, looking thoughtful.

"That's true," he said. "In a hundred years, we'll both be dead, and no one will remember me."

"A hundred years, a thousand, who cares?"

"A thousand… Yes, if it's precisely a thousand, we'll still be dead." The spinner laughed. "You'll see," he said. "And then they all will."

"What do you want?" Li He asked again, blunt because he was cold and tired of thinking about death.

"A trade," said the man. "Inspiration for immortality."

"I have plenty of inspiration."

"But I could give you more."

Li He sighed. "If I say yes, will you go away?"

"Beware," said the specter. "You will never rest until you make them see."

"I never rest in any case," said Li He. "I'll write a poem and then we'll both be dead and no one will care."

By the time he made it back to the patrol, the others had gotten the fire started. His slim bundle of fallen bamboo smoked, too wet to burn well. It was a miserable night, and he wrote an indifferent couplet about the second spinner. It wasn't any good, and he put it on the fire too. The spinner should know there were many disappointments in life, he thought, chief among them the failed scholar and indifferent soldier Li He.

He tried again the next day, but it wasn't any better, and then the ghost of a dead girl stopped him on the path, and he wrote about her instead.

Perhaps the ache in his lungs was punishment, or perhaps that was a gift from one of the others whose poem hadn't been good enough. Perhaps it was just bad luck. He'd never known any other kind.

He didn't think of it again until he lay coughing, his body wracked with tremors and colder even than on patrol.

Shen Zi-ming gripped his hand. "Chang-ji," he said. "What can I do?"

"Paper," he said. "I have a poem to write."

"You can't even hold a pen." His friend's cheeks were streaked with tears.

"I'll tell it to you, then, and you'll write it."

Later, his friends would make up glorious lies about him being carried to heaven to write poetry, but the reality was a miserable affair: he coughed and coughed, and even if he could have thought of a poem, he couldn't stop spitting blood long enough to speak. Most corpses relax in death. They look like a yellow wax effigy, not a person asleep, but they do relax. Li He looked strangely restless, his odd, pale face twisted up in a frown that stuck. And so the biographers and the poets made up platitudes that would have made him laugh bitterly to hear.

In a thousand years, he was still dead and no one knew of the bamboo spinner.


End file.
